Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Machine learning algorithms grouped by learning style

There are different ways an algorithm can model a problem based on its interaction with the experience or environment or whatever we want to call the input data.

It is popular in machine learning and artificial intelligence textbooks to first consider the learning styles that an algorithm can adopt.

There are only a few main learning styles or learning models that an algorithm can have and we’ll go through them here with a few examples of algorithms and problem types that they suit.

This taxonomy or way of organizing machine learning algorithms is useful because it forces you to think about the the roles of the input data and the model preparation process and select one that is the most appropriate for your problem in order to get the best result.

Let’s take a look at four different learning styles in machine learning algorithms:

Supervised Learning

Input data is called training data and has a known label or result such as spam/not-spam or a stock price at a time.

A model is prepared through a training process where it is required to make predictions and is corrected when those predictions are wrong. The training process continues until the model achieves a desired level of accuracy on the training data.

Example problems are classification and regression.

Example algorithms include Logistic Regression and the Back Propagation Neural Network.

Unsupervised Learning

Input data is not labelled and does not have a known result.

A model is prepared by deducing structures present in the input data. This may be to extract general rules. It may through a mathematical process to systematically reduce redundancy, or it may be to organize data by similarity.